The Film Buffa Reviews: Kevin Costner and old fashioned charm power 'Horizon'

We're in pure western town, folks.

Think of what Marvel asks of their fans every time an origin movie comes out: chapters upon chapters of *sometimes* redundant storytelling, marked with a promise for even more with spin-offs. It’s exhausting. When the movies start being homework before the lights go out, the fun has been drained from that aspect of cinema. When sequels are currency like these modern Hollywood times, you find yourself looking ahead instead of appreciating what you’ve just watched.

At least Kevin Costner is up front with you about his daunting plans: make four movies that predate and postdate The Civil War, about the settlers making their trek west amid the threat of Native American attacks. He’s not messing around, and his character doesn’t have tight superhero outfits or powers; just horses, guns, willpower, and a resilience that doesn’t exactly come in a bottle.

Costner doesn’t need a multiverse to tell an expansive story; just give the man a big chunk of Americana, aka the open range of the western plains, to play with and you’ll get a rousing story. Horizon: An American Saga, the first part of that bold four-part saga, doesn’t waste its time flaunting its greatest trait early on in the three-hour run time: the beautiful scenery that encapsulates what those settlers were really chasing as they made their way west. The hills, plains, field, grass, trees, and seemingly endless obstacles were also a dream to those people--against the choice of the Natives who found the land first.

It’s Costner’s dream to build an epic enough story and cast of characters that will make people continue to come back for second and third (and hopefully a fourth) helping of old fashioned movie-making. The 80s-90s-esque delivery has me waiting for round two earnestly. It’s that old school charm that powers his first part, a three hour film that doesn’t have as many pacing issues as some critics made it out to be. Yes, a 180-minute film is going to have its sluggish moments and will ask you to only receive a certain amount of time with key characters with the promise for more. But when Costner’s Hayes Ellison does come riding up off a trail of horses up into a close-up with the camera, a smile will crawl across your face and you’ll be refreshed.

Horizon does have a deep bench of talented actors that moviegoers will recognize such as Michael Rooker, Will Patton, Sienna Miller, Sam Worthington, Danny Huston, Jena Malone, Dale Dickey and Luke Wilson. There’s also a roster of newer faces like Jon Beavers, Jamie Campbell-Bower, Tatanka Means, Owen Crow Shoe, and Abbey Lee. Audiences get time with all of them as the story begins in Wyoming in 1859, with a settler camp getting decimated by a group of Native Americans. The survivors find new salvation in a wagon trail heading west, but the threats don’t end on the move.

There are quite a few threads but all of them leave a small dent, like Rooker’s French soldier bonding with a few of the settlers, or Worthington’s Lieutenant slowly wooing the widowed Miller, whose family is just about wiped out early on in the film. Costner’s mysterious drifter rides into a town that has a dangerous rancher family called the Sykes lurking nearby. An encounter with Campbell-Bower’s loudmouthed young Sykes brother and Costner’s Ellison brings back the nervy tension of the gun battles from Open Range.

While there isn’t as much action in this part as there’ll be in others, it rattles the viewer when it’s in full swing. The brutality of the Apache and other groups of Native Americans doesn’t hold back, but Costner and co-screenwriter Jon Baird take the time to flesh out and display their point of view. Means and Shoe have pivotal scenes as two different kinds of Natives, the groups that wanted to kill as many as possible and the more wiser ones who saw the forest through the trees and acted differently. Such a daunting endeavor requires stories and characters worth rooting for and against, and Horizon settles its protagonists and antagonists into place.

Patience is required, but the promise of the trailer and Costner’s usual directing style deliver the goods. What you see is what you get, and barely any of it is CGI-enabled. For all the movie fans who hate the modern day surplus of superhero movies, Horizon is the other side of the pancake. A bare-boned American history-infused undertaking that could only reach screens if the brass balls of its leader are big enough.

Vanity is definitely not Costner’s greatest sin, because he has the equivalent of a supporting role in the first chapter that gives him top billing. He takes the time to present the vast array of souls who will populate the land of his epic vista, and he’s democratic with the screen time pie. His scenes, which find his gunman on the run with Lee’s prostitute after a standoff ends bloody, are riveting and leave you wanting more.

It’s Miller and Worthington who command the most time in Chapter One, playing characters on each side of the impending war. The wife who finds her family being severed on a daily basis, and the soldier who commands an army but can’t look past the civilian settlers and dreamers climbing the Mount Everest of those times: getting across that land was as dangerous as it gets.

In the director’s chair, Costner makes you feel every ounce of passion, pressure, and zeal that those people felt on their journey. Cinema’s west is his territory. There’s a moderate amount of bias that I carried in, because Horizon is exactly like the movies I watched with my dad growing up. It brings me right back to Kenrick and Esquire theaters.

That included a lot of Costner movies, a guy who hates CGI and directing bullshit even more than Christopher Nolan. The saying, “they don’t make them like this anymore” is overused these days, but Horizon is the replicant that new Hollywood studios chase down to kill. The fact that it didn’t do well in its opening week is no surprise, because it was set up to fail. Every discussion around it was tied to its length and old school setup, or attached to the Yellowstone drama that even Costner can’t outrun.

Unlike Barbenheimer, there was no PR machine mastery to ensure a safe landing for Costner’s Horizon. He knew it, and we knew it. But that doesn’t take away from what was put on the screen, which is a heart and soul, soup-to-nuts western that tells an important story from multiple viewpoints and doesn’t feel the need to speed everything up. Shouldn’t that be appreciated? If we lose big swings like this, the movies will turn into a sea of remakes, reboots, sequels, and tights. May as well stream it all.

Costner rides against that wave willingly, a renegade dinosaur holding off the Father Time of his favorite genre and making some of his money back in the process. If you ripped open his chest to see what he was made of, you’d find Horizon. This is who he is, and there is no change coming. Saddle up, or stream a boring rom-com instead.

I’m down for more. There are greener pastures ahead for Costner, even if they don’t exactly look like money right now. Satisfaction comes in many forms. Buy a ticket to Horizon, and don’t worry about the running time. It asks no more of you than Marvel would, but its filmmaking means are practical and charming instead of formulaic and robotic.